Hi.

It's getting to the point where I need to update my CAD machine. The current one has served well for about 3 years now, but for various reasons is getting to be a bit too slow. So, I need to find a new motherboard. Not really a problem, except for one issue.

I currently run 6 monitors on the thing, under XP. This is achieved with a motherboard that allows one PCI-E card, one AGP card, and one PCI card to co-exist. I need to find a decent motherboard that will allow at least three PCI-E cards to be fitted at the same time, with at least two PCI slots as well. One for an 8 port serial card (you can never have too many RS-232 ports when doing hardware development), one for future upgrade. It also needs copious amounts of USB sockets, and ideally will be a socket 775 board for a core2duo or core2quad processor.

I've had a look at various manufacturers web sites, such as Asus and Gigabyte, but none of them seem to allow you to search on features like number of x16 PCI-E slots. And there are so many variations it'll take days to go through them all the hard way. I'm hoping someone here may have already come across something that meets these specs and can point me in the right direction.

pca

Any chance of upgrading the displays? Two 30" displays would give you a lot of desktop with fewer borders between displays. Also, any reason you're not going with an i7 processor aside from cost?

I'm sure that they don't ship to the UK, but I always go to [url=newegg.com]newegg.com[/url] for such searches; their search engine is excellent. A power search for motherboards with 3 or more PCIe slots, 2 or more PCI slots, and a LGA775 socket gives me three results: Foxconn BlackOps X48, Foxconn ELA, and ASUS P5E3. There are a lot more if you go to LGA1366.

I'm running two 24 inch 1920x1200, two 20 inch 1600x1200, one 17 inch 1280x1024, and one 15 inch 1024 x 768 monitors. I'd love to upgrade that to eliminate the 15 and 17 inch monitors and replace them with a pair of 30 inch ones, but two 30 inch monitors on their own wouldn't really be sufficient I think. But the cost makes this impossible at the current time.

As for the i7, price is again too much. Looking at a couple of suppliers, the processor alone would be as much as a decent core2duo and motherboard, possibly including the ram I tend to stay a couple of generations behind the curve on non-gaming machines like this, it weeds out the expensive ones and those of dubious reliability. This current machine was a little old-fashioned even when I bought it, but it's been rock-solid the whole time I've had it. It's just a little underpowered.

pca

I found that Foxconn X48 one from Overclockers for £80, so only 60% more expensive than in the US It looks like it would do the job rather nicely. It's certainly on the list now, thanks.

pca

How wide is the graphics card you want to buy? If it is a double width card then you'll probably find that most of the other slots are covered by the graphics cards.

The Foxconn you linked to will only have that 1 PCI slot accessible if you fit 3 double width graphics cards into the PCIe slots. The left most graphics card will also be sitting right on top of the various USB and other headers as well which will mean a tight fit.

Intel are releasing another series of processors in the Core i range soon which should be cheaper than the current i7s.

Unlikely to be a problem. It would probably be three of these, or something along those lines. They don't need to be fast gaming cards, just something that will drive lots of screen area at good price and decent speed.

pca

Remember those 30" displays need dual dvi links to drive them.

An Nvidia Quadro4600 will drive 2 of them, or with cable splitters drive 4 of your current displays. Uses one pci express x16 slot, but is double width.

~$1600 US. Amazon

I use one of these with a 3007WFP for cad. Same # pixels as 2 20" 2007fp monitors.

Don't even cheap cards currently have Dual-Link DVI?

By cheap, do you mean cards intended for gaming?

Hi,

I recently purchased a system for simulation. Its an i7 with 6GB (I'll expand it to 12GB soon), with 2 NVidia 260s. The NVidias have 896 MB DDR3 Video RAM, and they are running SLI.

The Motherboard is a Foxconn Flaming Blade. It has 2ea PCIE-X16 slots for video cards in SLI or Cross-fire, 1ea PCIE-X1, 1ea PCIE-X4 slot, and 2 Standard PCI Slots. It has alot of built-in functions too. It has 6 SATA-3 connectors, runs 0, 0+1, 1, & 5 RAID configurations,

It also has 12 USB Ports and 2ea 10/100/1GB Ethernet ports. I guess whatever you do, you may have to change Disk Drives from PATA to SATA or use adapters. I used adapters on my old Core 2 Duo system with 750GB drives with no problems for a year.

The new system has 4 TB of WD drives.

I dual-boot Vista 64 and Windows 7 RC1.

I perform lots of simulations, and like you need the pixel pushing power for (don't discount that, drawing arc's takes alot of processing time). PCB Layout uses lots of arcs for plane fills unless you process negative planes to save time.

I run some very large (some system level) SPICE simulations. Even a Quad or Dual Hyperthreaded 3GHz Zeons can't touch it.

What's nice is when you have 4 Hyper-threaded cores (shows up as 8 cores on Windows Performance Monitor), nearly buried trying to solve a simulation. I'm sure plane fills and auto-routing would benefit from that as well.

There are "kits" of Intel i7 920 plus an Intel X58 motherboard plus Vista with a Windows 7 upgrade certificate for less than $500.00 US. I never looked into them because I think I was able to get mine the way I wanted it.

Good luck with your decision.

Ross

Hi.

Well, I finally got around to setting up the new cad machine based on that Foxconn Blackops motherboard. Actually, it was forced on me, as the older machine up and died on in the middle of a job for which I had been paid in advance exactly the amount needed to buy the new parts. I don't know whether to laugh or cry...

After two days of faffing around with pcs, and the house completely overrun with eviscerated machines, I finally have everything back together and running. I even managed to fix the old cad box, so I have a fall-back backup machine The problems appears to have been a faulty PCI graphics card, which was causing random lock-ups, reboots, and what have you. Never seen that particular fault before, normally a bad card simply dies rather than working and producing faults in something else. Weirdly, restoring the machine backup onto a different hard drive made it nearly work, while the original drive, running a complete clone of the new one, didn't work at all. No idea what's going on there.

Removing the graphics card and introducing it to the bin seems to have sorted that particular problem out, but the original one of the machine simply being too slow remains.

The new one does NOT suffer that problem. I put a Core 2 Quad Q9450 in it along with 4GB of very fast ram, and it's currently running perfectly at 3.2GHz. This is quite a step over the 2.66GHz the processor is rated at, but these new 45nm parts do seem to have an awful lot of headroom. My games box runs a 3GHz E8400 at 4GHz quite happily.

It's blazingly fast. I mean, REALLY REALLY fast. Probably as much computing power as all my other machines put together! I took the opportunity to upgrade a few other machines as well by carefully swapping parts around, so the two HD3850 cards out of my games box are in this new one, along with a third one off ebay new for very little money, and they've been replaced with an HD4870. Which is a whole new kind of quick for the gaming, but that's by the by.

I did similar tricks with hard drives to upgrade the backup server to 2TB from 1, and put the drives out of that into the new box. They're only a few months old, so I consider them to be soak-tested rather than used

I just need to get an 8 port serial card and it's done.

To get an idea of the speed increase I tried transcoding a DVD with Handbrake, which on the old machine manages about 21 FPS average at 2500kbit H.264. This box does it at 125FPS! That should do for the next while.

Thanks for the suggestions.

pca